How To Test Peformance & Load of Your Webhosting Using Blitz

Are you wondering how many concurrent connection your web-hosting can take? Do you want to test performance & load of the server?

When you are building your Website, API, iPhone app, Android app, it’s important for you to test the performance of it. Most of us hire developers to create your app or site and rely on their recommendation. As an owner, it’s your job to ensure your app or website perform for hundred, thousand or million of concurrent users at one time.

Either you can wait for that amount of users to come to your site or you can be smart, and use cloud load testing service like Blitz to test how much load your server/website can handle.

I recently migrated my site (ShoutMeLoud.com) from Cloudways hosting to Kinsta hosting. I was talking with Mark Gavalda (Kinsta founder) and he was quite confident about the quality of his hosting. He was confident enough to offer the load testing of the server and I gladly accepted his challenge.

That’s how I got to know about Blitz and in this tutorial I will share how can you load-test or take a performance test of your Web-hosting using Blitz. Before I share about Blitz features and how to use it to test server load limit, here is a video which you should watch first:

Blitz offers an easy to use dashboard to run various load and performance test. You can select between various test type and set parameters for load-testing. You can test your website performance with 200,000 virtual users, which will give you a detailed statistics of your server, website performance.

How to Load Test Web-hosting using Blitz?

Create an account on Blitz. They offer 14 days free trial account, which you can use to test their service. You need to activate your account using Credit card. You can cancel your subscription anytime before 14 days to not be billed.

Login to your Blitz account and first thing you need to do is add domain for which you want to do load test.

When you add a domain, you have an option to just list the domain or authorise the domain.

With list domain feature you can test server load on any website with 500 users for 1 minute. This is good for those who have shared hosting, as shared hosting are not as great in handling huge concurrent connections.

With Authorize domain feature you can bypass the above limit, and test with more concurrent virtual users.

If you are running a test on your own website, you should authorise the website. This would let you load test the server without any limit. TO authorize your domain, click on your name at the top, click on settings > Click on Blitz Keys > Authorisation

This step is easy as you can verify your domain ownership by creating a text file with the name given in File-based authorization, or you can use Meta-tag verification.

I used sFTP and created a file with the name given in this step and authorised my domain. (After adding the file, you need to add your domain and it will be authorized immediately)

Note: If you are using Cloudflare, you need to disable security on Cloudflare as it will not let you authorise the site or run the Blitz load test.

Once your domain is authorized, click on Play and configure your test settings. I recently moved to Kinsta Webhosting and wanted to test the performance of the my new hosting.

First test was for 60 seconds, scaling from 1-1000 concurrent users and here is what Blitz reported:

This rush generated 23,047 successful hits in 60 seconds and we transferred1.34 GB of data in and out of your app. The average hit rate of 384.12/secondtranslates to about 33,187,680 hits/day. The average response time was 273 ms.

Depending upon your requirement, you can run multiple tests and from various locations. They also offers a Chrome addon which makes testing a fun sport.

As a developer or a Web-hosting end user, you would find Blitz to be useful service to test your server limit. Eespecially if you are developing a website for millions of concurrent users, this is the best way to know if your server can handle that much traffic or not.

Subscribe on Youtube

"Shouting since 2008"
Harsh Agrawal is the founder & CEO of ShoutDreams, INC.
A blog scientist by mind and a passionate blogger by heart. His blog, ShoutMeLoud receives 1.5 million Pageviews/month and has over 832K subscribers.

COMMENTs ( 9 )

Blitz seems like a great service. I was wondering, however, if you have seen some of the others. For a smaller blog there is a free service at loadimpact.com for load testing. It only runs up to 25 simultaneous connections (for the free version) so it wouldn’t help your site but a smaller blog could benefit. No credit card or even e-mail registration is necessary for this basic test.

Hi Harsh,
I wonder which package on Kinsta you use, as this is definitely the great result. I assume you use at least 8GB for your VPS.
I tried many tests myself when it comes to speed even on 512MB VPS and got great results as long as I used Nginx or Litespeed as a web server.

@Csaba
When I was moving from Cloudways to Kinsta, even I thought I have to be on 8GB server. Mark told me I should be fine with 2GB as their server is powerful, and I’m surprised to see that their 2GB server are holding ShoutMeLoud without a hitch.

@Aniket
Somehow site was not performing well, and my dashboard with very slow. I asked their support, and since they are hosting expert, and now WordPress expert, they couldn’t help. Though the issue must be some server related, because as soon as I moved my site to Kinsta, my slow dashboard issue was resolved.

Harsh Thanks for your Amazing article…
What does these statstics Mean??
This rush
generated 23,047 successful hits
in 60 seconds and we
transferred1.34 GB of data in
and out of your app. The average
hit rate of 384.12/
secondtranslates to
about 33,187,680 hits/day. The
average response time was 273
ms.

Hi Ashik,
This stats means about 23047 time url is visited by 1000 simultaneously blitz user or bots in 60 seconds and total bandwidth used to send and receive site data is 1.34 gb. About 384.12 time this url is opened or visited by blitz users in a second and server response time 273ms to resolve dns.
I hope this clarify :)